"Have you?" said I, with a sigh. "I fancy I'm rearing a middling lot of them myself."
"Please, sir," said he to me on another occasion, "that there lumbago be terrible trying to know what to do with it."
"Oh!" said I with alacrity, "nothing equals hartshorn and oil applied to the small of the back with a flannel. You have a wife--"
"Yes, sir." He looked at me vacantly. "And yet, it's a beautiful thing."
"Well--yes, when it attacks one's deadly enemy."
"I've cut it down, and trimmed it out, and tied it up," said the gardener. He meant the _Plumbago capense!_
That man never would allow that he was beaten. My eldest boy one day held some pansies over the fumes of ammonia, turned them green, and showed them as a _lusus naturæ_ to the gardener. He smiled contemptuously. "Them's the colour of biled cabbage," said he; "I grew them verdigris green--beds of 'em, when I was with Squire Cross."
One day he said to me: "The nurserymen call them plants big onias just to sell them, I call them little onias; you shall just see them I grow, them be the true big onias, as large as the palm of your hand."
I tumbled, by hazard, at Nice into a pension, where I believe I saw at _table d'hôte_ a score of the ugliest women I have ever had the trial of sitting over against in my long career. I found out, in conversation with a porter at the station afterwards, that this pension was notorious for the ugly women who put up there, and it is a joke among the porters when they see one very ill-favoured arrive by the train, that she is going to be an inmate of the Hotel ----. The name I will not give, lest any of my fair readers, in that spirit of delightful perversity that characterises the sex, should go there and spoil the credit of the pension. I could not endure the _table d'hôte_ there for many days. An ugly woman is, or may be, restful for the eye when her face is in repose--not when she is chewing tough beef or munching an apple. Besides, Lent was passed.
When I was in Rome there appeared in a comic paper at the beginning of Lent the picture of a very stout lady, who thus addressed her spouse. "Hubby, dear! you haven't kissed me." "Can't, love," he replies, "_fat_ is forbidden in Lent." Ugliness was uncongenial to me in radiantly beautiful Nice, and in sparkling Easter--so I packed my Gladstone bag and went further.